German Historical Institute
Washington, D.C. Occasional Paper No. 1
Forty Years of the
Grundgesetz (Basic Law)
The Basic Law —
Response to the Past
or
Design for the Future?
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
Democratic Progress
and
SHadows of the Past
Gordon A. Craig
2
German Historical Institute
Washington, D.C.
Occasional Paper No. 1
Forty Years of the
Grundgesetz (Basic Law)
The Basic Law—Response to the Past or
Design for the Future?
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
University of Mannheim
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
Gordon A. Craig
Stanford University
3
Edited by Prof. Dr. Hartmut Lehmann and Dr. Kenneth F. Ledford, in
conjunction with the Research Fellows of the Institute © German Historical Institute, 1990
MACentire
Graphics Published by the
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1759 R Street, N.W. Suite 400
Washington, D.C. 20009 Tel.: (202) 387–3355
4
Preface
Nineteen eighty-nine is a year of many anniversaries. The city of Bonn celebrates
its two-thousandth birthday, and the city of Hamburg invites us to celebrate the
eight hundredth birthday of Hamburg harbor. Nineteen eighty-nine also marks the
two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and it was 200 years ago that
George Washington began his first presidency.
Considering these historic dates, one may wonder why the German Historical
Institute arranged two lectures marking the fortieth anniversary of the day on
which the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany was signed. In my view,
this made sense. When the Federal Republic of Germany was founded forty years
ago, memories of the Nazi terror were fresh in the minds of those who drew up the
constitution for a new and better Germany. They believed that the Basic Law
should safeguard individual rights and liberties, establish a truly democratic form
of government, and help to preserve those precious goals which had been
disregarded and lost under the Nazis and could be regained only with the help of
the Western powers.
Of course, in 1949 no one knew whether this experiment in democracy would
succeed or fail. Today, forty years later, we are witnesses to its success. A new
generation of German politicians who were not present when the Constitution of
1949 was signed today lives and works with the Basic Law. Furthermore, and of
equal importance, surveys taken by political analysts tell us that the German
population has accepted those rules laid down in 1949, and that, characteristically
enough, even the vast majority of those who criticize the government’s policies do
so with specific reference to the Basic Law. Thus even in the United States, with
its history of constitutional government of more than two hundred years, we may
say in all humility that Germany has made a promising start.
I am very grateful to Professor Gordon Craig from Stanford University and to
Professor Peter Graf Kielmansegg from Mannheim for accepting our invitation to
speak and for using the occasion to present a penetrating analysis of the Federal
Republic’s history. I would also like to thank Dr. Kenneth Ledford for helping me
to put into print this first issue of the Institute’s occasional papers.
Hartmut Lehmann
Washington, D.C.
5
The Basic Law —
Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
University of Mannheim
I.
On May 8, 1949, exactly four years after the unconditional surrender of the
German army, a small assembly of sixty-one men and four women gathered in the
less-than-splendid main lecture hall of a teachers' college in the provincial city of
Bonn, less well known to the world then than it is now. The Parliamentary Council,
as the Constitutional Convention of the future Federal Republic of Germany was
called, convened for its last working session. After nine months of plenary debate
and committee work, of controversies and compromises, the members of the
convention were finally asked to say "yes" or "no" to the draft of a constitution for
a West German republic. Fifty-three of them voted "yes", twelve "no", the majority
encompassing all of the deputies from the CDU, the SPD, and the FDP, i.e., the
three parties which were to become the dominant political forces in the new
republic. The minority was a strange coalition of smaller parties, Communists,
Catholics, and defenders of the autonomy of the states.
Fifteen days later, on May 23—after ten of the eleven state parliaments had
ratified the Basic Law—the constitution was signed by the members of the
Parliamentary Council in a dignified, but for obvious reasons unenthusiastic,
ceremony. This is the event we celebrate today. The historical process of the birth
of a West German republic, comprising two-thirds of what the war had left of
Germany, set in motion by the United States and Great Britain against French
resistance, reluctantly supported by the Germans themselves, had reached its first
stage.
Most of the founding fathers and mothers were already grown-ups thirty years
earlier when another constituent assembly, the Weimar National Assembly, had
met to deliberate another
Basic Law—Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
6
constitution for another republic. They could not help but wonder whether their
work would prove more successful than that of their predecessors. Today, I think,
it is justified to say that history has given a definite answer to this question: Yes,
the second democratic experiment in German history has been successful. The
Federal Republic of Germany has definitely joined the not-too-numerous family of
constitutional democracies, a group which comprises only roughly one-fifth of the
present membership of the United Nations.
What is less clear, however, is to what extent the West German constitution, the
Basic Law, which we commemorate today, contributed to this success. Historians
who try to explain the failure of the Weimar Republic do not regard the
deficiencies of its constitution as a decisive factor. But most of them think that
these deficiencies played a negative role in the crisis of its last three years. There is
also a general feeling that the "anti-Weimar-constitution" of the Bonn republic, as
the Basic Law is sometimes called, has been and is a solid framework for
democratic politics. But how precisely did it influence the development of the
Federal Republic? Would the fate of the Federal Republic have been different
under the Weimar Constitution? And could the Weimar Republic, to ask an even
bolder, more speculative question, have survived with the Basic Law? This kind of
thought experiment (which most historians abhor, whereas I am inclined to find it
useful and stimulating) leads us to the general problem of how important
constitutions are in comparison with social and economic factors-the United States
of course being one of the great examples that would have to be considered. It is
with these questions in mind that I shall try to evaluate the impact that the Basic
Law had on the development of constitutional democracy in West Germany since
1949.
There is general agreement that the Basic Law first and foremost is a reactive
constitution. The past that had shaped the political outlook of the founding fathers
and mothers had two faces: an ill-functioning, weak, and helpless democracy on
the one hand and a cruel despotism on the other. Four fundamental conclusions
were drawn from these memories: a constitution which effectively protected
individual rights was to be the new sovereign; parliamentary democracy was to be
institutionalized in such a way that strong and effective government was possible;
democracy had to be enabled to defend itself against its enemies; and last but
certainly not least, the future Germany had to be definitely tied to the idea of
peaceful cooperation among nations.
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
7
Let me briefly describe how these four conclusions shaped the constitution. To
begin with, there is the bill of rights, the first nineteen articles of the constitution.
There is also the Constitutional Court, entrusted with the ultimate responsibility for
enforcing the constitution (above all the bill of rights) against all three branches of
government, the executive, the judicial, and, most importantly, the legislative. The
Constitutional Court is really the embodiment of the idea of the sovereignty of the
constitution. Perhaps the clearest expression of the Parliamentary Council's
determination to subordinate all state power to constitutional restrictions is the
clause that rules out amendments to the constitution, as far as the fundamentals are
concerned. In other words, the Basic Law gives the rule of law—which is the
general principle lying behind the idea of the sovereignty of the constitution—
priority over the democratic idea of popular sovereignty. The Basic Law is not a
majoritarian constitution. In this respect, it is much closer to the constitution of the
United States than to most west European constitutions. It could hardly be
otherwise in a country in which 44.9% of the electorate had voted National
Socialist in the last relatively free elections in March 1933. Let me add that the
Basic Law also contains a more rigid general version of the rule of law than any
other constitution that I know. Article 19 states that whatever public authorities do
is subject to judicial control if individual rights might be affected.
The ingenious constructive vote of no-confidence is usually regarded as the core
of the Parliamentary Council's scheme of strong and effective parliamentary
government. But it is only one element in this scheme, and in my view people tend
to make too much of it. To characterize the constructive vote of no-confidence a
little bit more fully: on the one hand it is the supreme responsibility of the
Bundestag to elect the Chancellor and to support him so as to enable him to govern
effectively; there is no president to step in if parliament fails to live up to this
responsibility. On the other hand, parliament is denied the right to overthrow the
government at will. It has to elect a new chancellor if it wants to get rid of the
incumbent. This, as you all know, happened only once in the history of the Federal
Republic, in 1982, when Chancellor Schmidt was replaced by Chancellor Kohl. At
the same time, the Parliamentary Council balanced its effort to strengthen
government by limiting rigidly the possibilities of dissolving parliament. The
conditions under which the Bundestag can be dissolved are defined in extremely
narrow terms.
Basic Law—Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
8
Finally, I must mention in this context the five percent clause of our electoral
law, which modifies the basic rule of proportional representation by denying
parliamentary representation to parties that do not gain at least five percent of the
total vote. The five percent clause is, of course, not part of the Basic Law, but it is
an integral element of the Parliamentary Council's scheme of responsibility and
effective parliamentary government. Its purpose is to prevent an extreme
fragmentation of the party system and thereby to support the formation of stable
majority coalitions in parliament.
Part of the constitutional picture is also the strictly representative character of
our democracy. The Basic Law—like the constitution of the United States—is one
of the few democratic constitutions that exclude definitively all elements of direct
democracy. Parliament has to bear full responsibility—this was the firm conviction
of the founders. Once more, of course, the final years of Weimar are the
background for this decision, the misuse then of the initiative by extremist parties.
The Parliamentary Council hoped that a purely representative republic would be
less susceptible to demogogy.
All this reflects most clearly the Parliamentary Council's judgment about the
main weaknesses of the parliamentary system of Weimar: the fragmentation of the
party system; the refusal of the parties to assume the responsibility of reliably
supporting a chancellor and his cabinet if this meant to accept compromises; and
the manipulative interference of the president, misusing his power to appoint and
dismiss the chancellor, to dissolve parliament, and to issue emergency decrees.
The third group of constitutional regulations that are clearly a response to the
past are those giving effect to the idea that a democracy ought and should be able
to defend itself against its enemies. Again the Constitutional Court plays a key role
in this conception of legitimate self-defense. It is the Constitutional Court that has
the right to ban parties actively trying to subvert or overthrow the constitution,
although the initiative has to be taken by government or parliament. And it is the
Constitutional Court that can declare certain basic individual political rights forfeit
if they are misused for the purpose of fighting against democracy.
Finally, we must consider the new approach to international relations. There are
several constitutional clauses which bear witness to the founders' determination to
make it impossible for Germany ever again to disturb the international peace. The
constitution explicitly forbids the use of military force except to
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
9
resist aggression. This is not unique; the Japanese have gone even beyond that, but
it is remarkable nevertheless. There are few states around the world that have
accepted this kind of constitutional self-restriction. The constitution also
incorporates generally acknowledged rules of international law into national law,
directly binding upon all authorities and citizens of the Federal Republic. It
authorizes parliament to transfer rights of sovereignty to supranational institutions,
and it encourages the Federal Republic to join a system of collective security as the
best way to promote peace.
The extent to which these constitutional declarations of intent have anticipated
the real course of West German foreign policy is extraordinary. By "anticipated," I
mean that West German foreign policy must not be misunderstood as just the
constitution being executed. West German foreign policy has been guided by what
the political elites conceived as the raison d'etat of the Federal Republic. But there
is a remarkable conformity between the dominant views of the raison d'etat of the
Federal Republic in the last forty years and the objectives laid down in the
constitution.
This is not altogether surprising. Since World War II, most European
democracies have pursued a policy of joining integrated communities or alliances.
But the case of the Federal Republic is different. For her to become a member of
the European Community and the Atlantic Alliance was not just one out of several
foreign policy options. It was the logical conclusion of the founding of a West
German state. In this sense, the treaties integrating West Germany into the Western
community are part of the constitution of the Federal Republic, not legally of
course but in substance.
I hope that I have made it clear what it means to call the Basic Law a response
to the past, a reactive constitution. As to the future, nothing was more important to
the founding fathers and mothers than to make it perfectly clear that the Federal
Republic was meant to be transitory state. All Germans who had made up their
minds to collaborate with the occupation powers in setting up a West German state
were troubled by the question of whether they were actively contributing to the
permanent division of their country. They did not know the answer. All they could
do was to state as clearly as possible that they did not want to.
This is the message of the preamble and the last article of the constitution. The
founding of a West German state was in no way meant as a renunciation of the
nineteenth century idea of a unified national German state. The constitution of the
Federal Republic is rather a confirmation of that idea.
Basic Law—Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
10
II.
Let me now consider the effect that this constitution, so thoroughly shaped by
the memories of a generation that had lived through failure and catastrophe, had
upon the development of the second German republic—the role it played in what is
generally regarded as a success story. It is obvious that it would take more space
than I am allotted to treat this subject adequately. I shall therefore confine myself
to those features of the Basic Law which constitute its peculiarly "reactive"
character.
Let me begin with a warning. In talking about a success story, we must be
careful not to overrate the importance and the impact of the constitution. One must
always remember that the Basic Law did not have to bear the most crippling
burdens under which the Weimar Constitution collapsed. There was the marvellous
and speedy economic recovery after World War II, for which American aid was so
essential. Instead of a humiliating peace treaty, there was early readmission to the
community of free nations. And even the shock of total defeat was helpful. Unlike
their parents one generation before, most Germans could not help but realize what
had happened, and they were wise or just realistic enough not to gamble away the
opportunities history, especially the break-up of the coalition of victors, offered
them. On the other hand, there was the division of the country, something the
Weimar Republic did not have to live with. But surprisingly, even the division of
the country did not really destabilize democracy in West Germany, as it might well
have done to the Weimar Republic. Confrontation with a communist dictatorship
in the disguise of a German republic and exposure to the threat of thirty Russian
divisions on German soil taught most Germans a very impressive lesson on the
value of constitutional democracy and the rule of law and of being firmly tied to
the West.
All this, let me repeat, gave the Basic Law a much better chance of success than
the Weimar Constitution ever had. But it does not mean that constitutions do not
matter. I am convinced that they do matter. The idea that the Federal Republic
should be a constitutional democracy in the sense that the constitution is the
sovereign has been extraordinarily successful, perhaps even too successful—I shall
return to this ambivalence. The Basic Law has really become a basic law, the
supreme law of the land, controlling political power, providing fundamental
orientation for the political process. Its impact extends far beyond the limits of the
political system
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
11
proper. Describing the impact of the constitution, we are of course talking about
the Constitutional Court. It is the jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court that has
made the constitution the supreme law of the land. To an American audience this
sounds very familiar—although one must not forget that the Constitutional Court
and the Supreme Court are quite different institutions. But in German, and one can
probably even say in European, constitutional history it is an absolutely new
phenomenon. Never before has a constitution had such a deep and all-pervading
influence, because never before has such a powerful enforcement agency been
established. The decision to set up a very powerful Constitutional Court is perhaps
the single most important decision of the Parliamentary Council.
There is room for only a few examples of issues upon which the impact of the
jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court has been great: the relation between federal
authorities and the states; the rules under which parties compete, including the
financing of parties; the deployment of Pershing II missiles on German soil; the
limits of public debt; the rules regulating the admission of students to the
universities; codetermination of students in universities and workers in industrial
enterprises; the implications of Art. 5—freedom of speech and information—for
public and private television; and so on. All these issues have been subject to
judicial review. The authoritative interpretation of the constitution by a judicial
body has become a crucial element of the political process under the Basic Law.
It is not surprising that this experience has led to the critical question of whether
the sovereignty of the constitution as intended by the Parliamentary Council means
that one has to accept a constitutional court as one's sovereign. The answer is
probably "yes," although a court is a very special sovereign. It cannot act by itself.
It has to be brought into action by others. And it can only define the legal
framework within which the other constitutional authorities have to wield their
powers; it cannot absorb those powers in substance. Accordingly there has never
been any serious attack on the institution of the Constitutional Court as such. There
have been disputes about certain decisions. There was some concern in the
progressive sector of public opinion in the seventies about the balance between
Parliament and the Court, after the Court had declared a few reform projects of the
social-liberal coalition unconstitutional. But in spite of occasional irritations, the
Court enjoys a surprisingly widespread and stable support, more than any other
institution the Basic Law has created.
Basic Law—Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
12
Let us now turn to the attempt of the founding fathers and mothers to ensure
effective and responsible parliamentary government by constitutional means. I
think one cannot deny that on the whole the parliamentary system in the Federal
Republic worked as the founders wanted it to work. But it is doubtful whether the
constitution played more than a marginal role in bringing about this result. The
truth is that one cannot ensure stable and effective parliamentary government by
constitutional means. In other words, the decisive factors were not the rules of the
game but the players—the parties, the electorate, and what grew out of the
interaction between parties and electorate, the party system of the Federal
Republic. The parties accepted the responsibility of governing the country, and
they understood the necessity of compromise. And the electorate shaped a party
system that made stable and effective majority coalitions possible—throughout her
forty year history the Federal Republic was governed by majority coalitions, and
only two out of ten of these coalitions failed to serve their full term.
It is indeed something like maturity of the political elites and of the voters—
non-existent in the Weimar Republic—to which the second German republic owes
the stability and effectiveness of its political system. This maturity is nothing to be
particularly proud of. Whereas the defeat of 1918 bred irrationality, the total
collapse of 1945 gave rationality a chance. And the extremely favorable
circumstances under which the Federal Republic grew up in the fifties made it easy
to make use of this opportunity. But it remains an important fact that the collective
rationality of the actors is not simply a natural consequence of the constitutional
rules of the game.
If one of those rules had a measurable effect, it is certainly not the famous
constructive vote of no-confidence; the conditions under which it could have been
relevant did not arise for a long time. It is rather the five percent clause of the
electoral law. The development of the German party system from 1949, when
seven parties won seats in the first Bundestag, to 1961, when only three of them
were left, and the stability of this three-party system during the sixties and
seventies cannot be explained without taking this clause into account. But neither
can it be explained by the five percent clause alone. In the eighties, we are in the
process of learning that the five percent clause and a fragmented party system are
perfectly compatible.
And what about the effect of the third group of constitutional rules I have
brought to your attention, the rules of legitimate democratic self-defense? It is well
known that the Federal Republic,
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
13
unlike the Weimar Republic, has never been seriously threatened by militant
extremist forces misusing the freedom granted by a democratic system in order to
destroy democracy. To be sure, political groups that fall under this description
existed and still exist, but they have always remained marginal, which is of course
not an effect of the constitution but a consequence of the general political, social,
and economic development of the country. This does not mean that the
constitutional scheme of democratic self-defense became quickly obsolete. Two
parties were banned by the Constitutional Court in the fifties, and the ban was
rather rigidly enforced by the government and the legislature. These early verdicts
had a lasting effect. The fringe parties of the left and the right have ever since been
careful to make it clear that they are in agreement with the fundamentals of the
Basic Law. They have at least avoided any open denunciation of the principles of
constitutional democracy and the rule of law. The Communist Party, banned in
1956, refounded in 1968, now shielded by the tacit agreement that it should be
tolerated as the price demanded by the policy of detente, is a good example of the
Damocles effect of Art. 21 of the constitution. Incidentally, the awkward problem
of what the difference is, in terms of constitutionality, between the old and the new
Communist Party has never been brought to the attention of the Constitutional
Court; the Court, as you will recall, cannot act by itself.
But as time went by, it became more and more apparent that the Federal
Republic had to face different challenges than the Weimar Republic, i.e., not the
frontal attack of openly antidemocratic forces against which the founders had
designed their scheme of democratic self-defense. With the students' revolt of the
late sixties, a radical new left began to prosper in West Germany as in other
western democracies. Its impact on the universities and on certain segments of
public opinion was considerable. This radical new left confessed allegiance, if not
to the constitution, at least to the basic principles underlying the constitution. And
most of the rebels probably meant it. But at the same time, they attacked the
Federal Republic fiercely as the very negation of their vision of democracy. For
them, allegiance to this vision and disloyalty to the Federal Republic were two
sides of one coin. What was an adequate response to this challenge?
That is the question behind the controversy about the "Berufsverbot," to use the
misleading catchword that caused so much damage to the reputation of the Federal
Republic abroad, a contro-
Basic Law—Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
14
versy in which both sides fought with extraordinary passion and bitterness. I do not
wish to go into the details of what is a very complicated story, both from the
political and from the legal point of view. It is enough to say that the difficult
question of how to define and how to ensure loyalty of the public service to the
constitution, if "constitution" means more than just a few lofty principles, literally
divided the country. And no answer has been found upon which both sides could
agree. It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that the controversy about the
"Berufsverbot" marks a turning-point in the history of the Federal Republic. A
consensus on what kind of democratic self-defense is legitimate and against whom
it is necessary, so fundamental for the founders, no longer exists. No scheme of
democratic self-defense, however, can work unless all democrats are in agreement
on when and how to use it.
The lesson we had to learn in the seventies was that the balance between self-
assertiveness and tolerance in a democracy is a very delicate one. The founders,
determined to learn their lesson, had paid little attention to this balance. And I
think it is only fair to say that—considering their experience with the suicidal
tolerance of the Weimar Republic—it could have hardly been otherwise. But this
experience is no longer ours. The seventies have taught us that we have to find our
own answer.
The problems of the eighties are in many ways different from those of the
seventies. But there is also continuity between the decades: a process of
polarization that has its roots in the late sixties is making steady progress. It is this
process of polarization among those who regard themselves as believers and
supporters of democracy, not the strength of antidemocratic forces, that challenges
our republic. It is this process of polarization that has weakened the idea that
democratic politics have to be under all circumstances politics under the law. And
it is this process of polarization that has encouraged the fringe to break the taboo
against violence upon which democratic politics are based.
III.
With these last observations, I have reached the threshold between the past and
the future. I have tried to show that there is no plain answer to our question: how
did the Basic Law contribute to the success of the second democratic experiment in
Germany? In
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
15
framework for the future that in many respects has stood the test of time. Above
all, the idea of the sovereignty of the constitution, enforced by a Constitutional
Court, has been really put into practice. In the thirty-eight years of the jurisdiction
of the Constitutional Court, the Basic Law has won a pervading influence in all
spheres of public life. As to the constitutional provisions designed to ensure
effective and responsible parliamentary government, I have argued that they were
helpful, certainly not dysfunctional, but not decisive. The constitution is not the
key factor in explaining the stability and the effectiveness of the parliamentary
system in the second German republic, but it is not negligible. The elaborate
scheme of democratic self-defense, on the other hand, the third important element
in the founders' response to the traumatic experience of the failure of the Weimar
Republic, has been presented as an example of the truism that by responding to the
past one cannot be sure to give adequate answers to the problems of the future.
This is of course not a complete assessment. But even a much more detailed
investigation into the role the constitution played in the history of the Federal
Republic would, I think, not produce very different results. Let me therefore in my
conclusion turn from the past to the future. What are the challenges the constitution
has to face in the next years?
To begin with, there has never been, and there is not now, any serious demand
for fundamental constitutional reform. The numerous amendments that we have
had in the last forty years were in most cases of a technical nature. In the seventies,
the long report of what in the United Kingdom would have been a "Royal
Commission on Constitutional Reform" ended with the conclusion that the Basic
Law had done well, and that there was no need for large-scale constitutional
reform. This is still the predominant view. As far as I can see, there are only two
constitutional issues that are likely to be on the political agenda in the next few
years.
The Basic Law is unique among the constitutions of the world in that it grants
asylum to political refugees as an individual right protected by the courts without
any qualification. Parliament has no power to curtail this right by law. Many raise
the question: how long we can afford this generosity in view of the unquestionable
fact that in most cases it is not political persecution but economic misery that
drives people from the Third World and from eastern Europe to West Germany.
Public opinion is split. The groups which feel that Germany has a special
obligation to keep her
Basic Law—Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
16
frontiers open, the churches among them, are more articulate. But the more or less
silent majority is probably in favor of an amendment to restrict the right of
asylum.
The other issue, still in the background, is the question of whether the German
people are ripe for direct democracy. There has been growing criticism of the
purely representative character of our democracy in the last few years. And
recently, the chairman of the SPD, Hans-Jochen Vogel, came out in favor of the
initiative and the referendum, not without provoking opposition in his own party.
In both cases it is quite unlikely that we shall actually have constitutional
amendments in the foreseeable future. Constitutional amendments require a two-
thirds majority in both houses of parliament, i.e., they require a consensus between
the two main parties. Neither the CDU nor the SPD is moving in that direction.
All this is of course not yet an answer to our question. The real challenges that
the constitution will have to face have not yet been mentioned. These real
challenges, I think, have something to do with the process of political polarization
upon which I have already touched. Since the late seventies this process has
visibly begun to transform the party system. Because the stability and
effectiveness of parliamentary government in the last four decades has been
intimately connected with the party system, this is a serious development.
The German party system as we know it took shape in the fifties, emerging in a
process of concentration from a much more fragmented system. The characteristic
three-party system, with two major parties, right of center and left of the center,
and a small liberal center party, was not fully developed until the federal elections
of 1961. In this system, the two major parties were both able to integrate more than
40% of the voters, although only once did one win more than 50% of the total
votes. To the right of the CDU/CSU and to the left of the SPD, no politically
relevant party existed. The liberals at the center were in a strategic position. They
could choose between the two major parties. In fact the decision of the liberals to
change sides has been responsible for the two major political realignments of the
last thirty years.
This system was not without shortcomings. It gave the liberals a political
weight quite out of proportion to their electoral success. Alternation of
government, essential for democracy, depended less on the electoral vote than on
the strategic calculations of the liberals. But the system worked. One of its healthy
effects was that it contributed to continuity and moderation in German politics.
But
Peter Graf Kielmansegg
17
it also left room for innovation.
It looks as though this system is crumbling. A process of fragmentation has set
in since the late seventies and is still making progress. A radical left party is
already well-established. The ecological issue and the peace issue have both been
instrumental in reaching this result. Without the mobilizing effect of these two
issues, it would have been difficult for a new party to break through the traditional
cold war taboo against left radicalism and to overcome the five percent clause. On
the other hand, the transformation of the two single-issue movements into an
apparently permanent party would have been unlikely if the political space to the
left of the SPD had not been left unoccupied. We can no longer exclude the
possibility that, with a time-lag of five or eight years, something similar is
happening at the opposite end of the political spectrum: an issue, if not a mass
movement, at least a mass resentment, a radical party emerging from this
resentment to occupy a position in the party system that for a long time had been
taboo. But that is still an open question.
In a comparative perspective, the process of fragmentation is also a process of
normalization. The West German party system has been much narrower, much
more center-oriented than the party systems of most West European democracies.
But this is little comfort. With a more fragmented, more extended party system,
politics in the Federal Republic will become more difficult. There will be less
continuity, less calculability, maybe less stability of government.
To polarization and fragmentation of the party system, a third key word has to
be added: alienation. There is no doubt that a significant proportion of those voting
for the new extremist parties are deeply alienated from the political system
altogether-more on the left than on the right wing of the political spectrum, where
most extremist voters seem to be motivated by a few specific issues. Political
violence, the clearest indicator of political alienation, has increased during the last
decade, although political terrorism appears to have passed its peak. There are
other more widespread symptoms of alienation than active violence itself—the
frequent talk about the necessity of "resistance" in recent years is one of them. I am
convinced that this kind of irresponsible talk by people who would have nothing to
do with violence themselves has done much to lower the threshold between
peaceful and violent political engagement. But I cannot go into details. All I want
to point out is that what we perceive as structural change in the political system
Basic Law—Response to the Past or Design for the Future?
18
is probably related to a more fundamental cultural change. How will the
constitution serve the country under these conditions?
Those who will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Basic Law will probably
know the answer. I do not. I am sure that the constitution will continue to function
as an acknowledged framework for the political process. All groups, with marginal
exceptions, will continue to confess allegiance to the constitution. But is
constitutional consensus all the consensus that democracy needs in order to
maintain its fragile system of peaceful accommodation of conflict? What is, in the
case of the Federal Republic, the substance of what we might call constitutional
consensus, considering the more or less permanent struggle between progressive
and conservative interpretations of the constitution? Does constitutional consensus
secure the mutual tolerance and respect between political adversaries, threatened
by polarizing tendencies, that a democracy definitely needs?
Occasionally the question has been raised of whether there has not been too
much emphasis on constitutional consensus in the Federal Republic. It is, I think, a
legitimate question. There is indeed a danger of overburdening the constitution, of
expecting too much of it. There is probably no other country in the world where
the idea of a patriotism based exclusively on the constitution, oriented exclusively
toward the constitution, would be discussed. In West Germany, this form of
patriotism has been propounded and is indeed seriously discussed, even if only
among intellectuals. Do these intellectuals, does the Federal Republic, to ask the
last in a long series of questions, anticipate a new post-national era in which people
will define their political ide4tity not in terms of nation and country but in terms of
values laid down in a particular constitution? Or does the idea simply reflect the
peculiar problems of a divided nation in a divided country with a catastrophic
history?
To end with a long series of questions may seem to indicate skepticism about
the future. There is indeed, I think, some reason for concern. But one must not
forget, that another long series of questions has been answered by the history of the
last forty years. The Basic Law has stood the test of these forty years. This
experience is encouraging.
Gordon A. Craig
19
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
Gordon A. Craig
Stanford University
Birthdays are occasions upon which one would like to find the breakfast table
laden with, at the very least, dozens of brightly colored greeting cards. In the case
of our friend and ally the Federal Republic of Germany, these seem to have been
confiscated by some malevolent fairy godmother, one perhaps who was not invited
to the original feast, who has left instead a muddle of problems and perplexities,
including unemployment, refugees, acid rain, nuclear weapons, the Third World,
political corruption, declining birth rate, and the elections in Berlin and Hessen.
Even worse, instead of the congratulations that the Geburtstagskind might have
expected to hear on a fortieth Jubiläum, the air is filled with complaints,
objurgations, and accusations from people he had regarded as friends, some of
whom have not hesitated to invoke specters from the past to add weight to their
criticisms. "The Ghost of Hitler May Lead Germans into New Mistakes," one
headline in the London Sunday Telegraph of 23 April says ominously. "A 'Stab in
the Back' by NATO's New Wets," declares another. "What we have here is
grandstanding by a panic-stricken government," says an Bush administration
spokesman concerning the Genscher initiative on missiles. This is not enough for
Patrick Buchanan, who sees a betrayal of NATO and an imminent drive on the part
of the Federal Republic for re-unification and the domination of Mitteleuropa; or
for William Safire, who sees the West Germans, whom he has already castigated as
"Merchants of Death," as planning to "seek their destiny in the East;" or for George
Will, who declares portentously that "this century will end as it began and as it
appeared in its middle period: on guard against Germany."
Surely the times are out of joint when a foreign policy initiative can elicit this
outpouring of suspicion against an ally, and particu-
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
20
larly against one that has so often in the past been praised to the skies by British
and American statesmen for its success in overcoming its past, its democratic
progress, and its loyalty to NATO. Surely we would be better advised to regard
what we have seen in this capital recently as a kind of hysteria that will in time ebb
and disappear and to use this occasion for a judicious memory, recalling the events
of the Federal Republic's forty years, the crises overcome, and the progress
achieved toward effective democratic government. Perhaps that will give us the
perspective to view some of the Bundesrepublik's present problems with more
equanimity and understanding than the newspaper columnists and headline writers
have shown.
Some time ago, in the pages of the British journal The Spectator, Timothy
Garton Ash described the Federal Republic as "one of the most prosperous, free,
secure, and respected countries in the world." Forty years ago, when Germany was
still a disoriented and traumatized land, the idea of such a transformation would
have been considered ludicrous. In the years from 1945 to 1949, the Gallup
organization was fond of asking Americans how they rated German chances for
economic recovery and for progress toward democracy. The respondents were
agreed that the former would come slowly and painfully, but with respect to the
ability of the Germans to develop a truly democratic society and to give it effective
governance, they had the strongest doubts, and the majority were inclined to
believe that a return by the Germans to their familiar demons was more likely. Yet
since 1949, we have become accustomed to thinking of the Bundesrepublik as a
country very much like our own, with similar institutions, with similar problems,
and with the same capacity for approaching problems with democratic methods.
Our original doubts and suspicions, which were very active, were overcome by a
number of developments that can be briefly rehearsed.
1. The first development—although this was not immediately apparent—was
the fact that the catastrophe of 1945 gave birth to a radically new political
consciousness in western Germany that was shared by all of the political leaders
who wrote the Basic Law. Last March, in a newspaper interview, Sebastian
Haffner described the change by saying that Germans came to their senses and
realized that they had lived too long under the hypnosis induced by slogans and
charisma. A more satisfactory explanation perhaps is that provided years ago by
Kurt Sontheimer when he wrote that there was a pervasive, if not always clearly
articulated, feeling that the
Gordon A. Craig
21
way to a better future must lead back to the origins of the ideas of freedom and
justice in Western political thought, that is, back to the theory of natural rights and
to the traditions of the Enlightenment and classic liberalism, which had always
played a part in German political thinking but never a dominant one. Thanks to this
change of orientation, the State—that mystical entity to which generations of
Germans had paid obeisance before 1945 and which had served to condone both
absolutism and foreign adventurism—was depersonalized and de-mythologized,
and the tie between the individual and his government became pragmatic rather
than romantic. This was actualized in the Basic Law by safeguards to protect the
democratic institutions that that document established and, as Henry Ashby Turner
has written in his new book on the two Germanies, by a "skillful combination of
delimitation and flexibility [that] has enabled the complex federal system to
function with a minimum of friction." The new spirit was manifest also when,
under American pressure, the new republic was called upon to begin re-
militarization at the time of the Korean War. At that time, greatly to the annoyance
of the Pentagon, which wanted to have German troops available as quickly as
possible, the West German Bundestag insisted that, before a new army came into
existence, measures must be taken to prevent a regression to the evils of the old
military system, in the first instance by careful selection of officer candidates and
elimination of persons with dubious political associations and subsequently by
provision for political education in the training program.
2. The new political orientation and the new constitution would, of course,
probably have come to nothing if the country had not—and this is my second
point—been favored with a group of gifted and energetic leaders capable of giving
guidance to a population that may have felt that things could not any longer be run
as they had in the past but had no very precise idea about how this was to be
accomplished and was, in any case, disoriented and traumatized by the recent
military defeat and the conditions of life under allied occupation. To shake them
out of their passivity, to interest them in politics again, and to chart the way toward
a recovery of sovereignty on a democratic basis was the work of men like
Socialists Kurt Schumacher and Ernst Reuter, the liberal Theodor Heuß, who
became the first president of the Federal Republic, and the Christian Democratic
leaders Ludwig Erhard, the father of the economic miracle, and Konrad Adenauer,
who served as Federal Chancellor from 1949 until 1963.
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
22
A few years ago I was a guest on a television talk show in Cologne, a program
called "Abenteuer Bundesrepublik." The discussion leader asked the group what
was the first name that came to their minds when they thought about the republic's
history and, when one of the older guests answered "Konrad Adenauer," turned to
one of the youngest, a student at the University of Cologne, and asked if she
agreed. She answered firmly, "I don't know anything about Adenauer! He doesn't
mean anything to my generation!"
She may have been correct in the first part of her answer, but hardly in the
second. Whether they realized it or not, Konrad Adenauer's political career did
have real meaning for her generation and their way of life. The democratic rights
that they enjoyed were due, to a significant extent, to Adenauer: to the fact that he
was able, by sheer force of personality, to neutralize and transform the disoriented
mood of the German people after the war and to overcome the automatic tendency
of his countrymen to believe that leaders could only be taken seriously when they
wore uniforms. His political style, which was stern, earnest, and patriarchal,
convinced them that the authority for which they longed could be found in a
democratic government under his leadership, and his long tenure of office provided
the time to lay down an effective infrastructure for the democratic state and the
continuity that invested democratic practice with an aura of normality.
At the same time—and this is connected with Kurt Sontheimer's point—
Adenauer set his face against the Germans' traditional preoccupation with their
own uniqueness, which had often taken illiberal forms, and against the nationalism
and preoccupation with power that had had such tragic results in the past. "In the
lands of the German West," he declared, "there is a natural longing to escape from
the confines of national narrowness into the fullness of the European
consciousness;" and he sought to give that desire effective form by making a
reconciliation with France a major objective of his policy, an effort that eventuated
in the conclusion of that Franco-German Treaty of Cooperation whose twenty-fifth
anniversary was celebrated on 22 January 1988. This, and Adenauer’s integration
of his country into the free world, and (something that is often forgotten) his
success in effecting in his own party a convergence of two religious confessions
that had been inimical towards each other for centuries, were fundamental and
impressive achievements.
Gordon A. Craig
23
3. West Germany's progress towards a stable democratic system depended,
however, on two additional steps. The first was to liberate itself from Adenauer's
personal form of government and to demonstrate that in the new political system
there was energy and will at the grass roots. Adenauer himself provided the
occasion for this. Despite his great services to the Federal Republic, there is no
doubt that in the last years of his long tenure as Chancellor he became increasingly
willful, increasingly rigid in his own views, and increasingly contemptuous of
those of others, and in November 1962 he gave the nation an example of
shockingly arbitrary behavior. In that month the weekly news magazine Der
Spiegel published an article about a NATO military exercise that the government
held was based in part on confidential material. Immediately, Adenauer's Minister
of Defense, Franz-Josef Strauß, through his military attaché in Madrid, persuaded
the Spanish government to arrest the author of the article, who was on vacation in
Spain; the editors of the magazine were locked in their offices, and their files
searched, and charges brought against them; and the Chancellor not only defended
these actions, but in defiance of all democratic legal procedure, declared in the
Bundestag that "an abyss of treason against the state" had been discovered. In
Wilhelmine Germany, or in the Third Reich, or in the DDR, this sort of behavior
would have been so usual as to arouse no particular attention. In the Federal
Republic, however, the storm of outrage that manifested itself indicated that public
opinion felt that this kind of old-fashioned authoritarianism was intolerable in a
democratic state. Five liberal ministers (that is, members of the FDP) resigned
from Adenauer's cabinet; Defence Minister Strauß was forced out of his post; and
the Chancellor himself was able to patch up his cabinet and hold on to office only
by promising to step down in the fall of 1963. The Spiegel case was a dramatic
demonstration of the vitality and new assertiveness of German democracy. It was
an indication that democracy was here to stay.
4. But perhaps something else was needed before that could be assumed with
full confidence. The Federal Republic had after all been governed ever since 1949
by a conservative coalition of the Christian Democratic and Christian Social
Unions, sometimes with the additional support of the Free Democrats, with a
consistent set of domestic policies and a foreign policy based on a firm refusal to
recognize or deal with the East German government or any of the eastern regimes
that recognized and supported it. What would
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
24
happen if there were a fundamental change of direction in German politics? Gustav
Heinemann, a member of the Confessing Church who had bravely resisted Hitler,
who had resigned from Adenauer's cabinet in 1950 after he learned that Adenauer
had secretly let the Americans know that he was willing to raise a contingent of
troops for the European Defense Community, and who became a Social Democrat
and, in 1968, the Federal Republic's third President, said after his election that he
had always believed that the true test of democracy would come when a change of
power (Machtwechsel) was accomplished and a fundamental change of domestic,
and particularly of foreign, policy was made.
That change came in 1969, in an atmosphere that was crisis-laden as a result of
the violent student troubles in German universities. These had their origins in the
belief of the academic youth that the country was beginning to drift back to the
authoritarianism and the militarism of the past and that universities were being
degraded into agencies for promoting conformism in society. There was of course,
something in this, for the universities were badly in need of reform. But the student
reform movement was taken over by radical elements that took violence into the
streets, and this led extremist conservative circles to call for extraordinary
measures to curtail the civil rights of rioters and to impose restrictions upon the
universities, which they considered as launching-pads of revolution. This serious
crisis in the history of the new democracy seemed a hardly propitious time for
fundamental political change, but in fact the election of Gustav Heinemann as
President and the subsequent formation of a new Socialist-Free Democratic
coalition that brought Willy Brandt to the chancellorship in 1969 were not only
effected without difficulty and in strict accordance with the provisions of the
constitution but helped to defuse the situation in the universities and the movement
on the right for a curtailment of civil liberties. Willy Brandt's subsequent
repudiation of the Adenauer-Erhard foreign policy and his launching of the policy
of Entspannung or détente with the east, caused stormy and dramatic scenes in the
Bundestag, but they were accepted without any resort to unconstitutional means by
the opposition and without the emergence of an irridentist anti-republican party of
the right of the kind that had fatally weakened the Weimar Republic of 1918–1933.
Brandt was able to pursue the Ostpolitik that eventuated in new treaties with the
Soviet Union, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic—treaties that
included a pledge to abstain from force in the settlement of international disputes
and, by laying the basis for
Gordon A. Craig
25
the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, contributed to a lowering of barriers and a
reduction of tensions between the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe—with the
enthusiastic support of his own people, while at the same time inaugurating an
ambitious domestic program of educational reform, social insurance, health care,
and other forms of social welfare legislation that make his chancellorship seem in
retrospect something like Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president.
5. There were, of course, other crises in the years that followed. There was the
one, for example, that briefly shook Bonn in 1974, when an East German spy was
discovered to have been working in the Chancellor's office, and Willy Brandt
immediately took full responsibility for this (which he need not have done) and
resigned his office (setting an example that has not been followed in other
democracies). There was the economic malaise that set in in the wake of the oil
crisis of 1973, when it was discovered that West Germany was suffering from a
"middle-aging" of the economy and from structural problems beyond the powers of
any Erhardian economic miracle to fix. There was the parliamentary crisis effected
by the sudden withdrawal of the Free Democrats from the Socialist-Liberal
Coalition at the end of 1981, which caused the fall of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt
and the beginning of the conservative regime of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in
January 1982. There was the crisis caused by the deployment of the Pershing
missiles and the cruise missiles a year later, which was opposed by the peace
movement and majority elements of the Greens and the Socialist Party. But the
point is that there was no comparison between these crises and those that occurred
in the 1920s and fed the strength of anti-republican movements with tragic results
in the early thirties. During the public agitation over all of the issues that I have
mentioned—and sometimes it was heated and led to public demonstrations in
which militant Sponti or anarchist groups resorted to rock-throwing and attacks on
the police—there was no evidence of any significant weakening of the democratic
sentiment of the West German people, and, when violence occurred in anti-nuclear
demonstrations, for example, no calls for restrictions upon the right of assembly or
other civil rights. Periodic polls taken by the Allensbach Institut für Demoskopie
showed that the overwhelming majority of the public continued to believe that the
system that had evolved since 1949 was "the best state form."
This has continued to be true during the Kohl regime. Indeed, during this recent
period, the Federal Republic has often seemed to
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
26
be a mirror image of the United States. This is true, not only in the nature of the
leadership of the two countries and in the generally conservative character of the
government's domestic policies, but even in the nature of the problems facing
them. In January of 1988, the influential Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Zeit
outlined five things that, in the opinion of the editors, threatened the well-being of
the commonwealth. These were, first, the problem of AIDS, the effects of which
are now perceptible in West Germany; second, a particularly nasty political
scandal in the state of Schleswig-Holstein—a kind of German Watergate; third, the
end of the five-year boom in world markets as a result of the October 1987 melt-
down in Wall Street; fourth, the revelation that the German atomic energy industry
had been dangerously delinquent in its safety precautions—a post Chernobyl
scandal of the first order—; and fifth, a continuation of the growing threat to the
environment that has already caused fearful damage for Germany's forests. These
are all problems, or the kinds of problems, that we worry about ourselves.
On the other hand, whereas at every turn one finds evidence of democratic
strength and vitality in the Federal Republic of Germany, and although the
similarities between the German democracy and our own are striking, it remains
true that Germans, periodically and disturbingly, seem worried about the fragility
of their institutions, that they talk a lot, and apparently worry a lot, about their
identity, and—connected with this—that they are preoccupied with their recent
past, their Nazi past, and what it means, and how it is to be interpreted, within the
totality of German history.
When Americans encounter political scandals or evidence of inefficiency or
negligence on the part of our government, they become angry and demand
corrective action, but they rarely leap to the conclusion that their system of
government is in jeopardy. The idea of a collapse of the republic does not occur to
them, because they are aware of horrendous problems and shattering crises in their
history—one thinks of the Civil War and the Great Depression—that they
overcame without any change in their constitution. The Germans do not have that
assurance. The democratic revolutions of 1848 were not able to maintain
themselves against the resilient power of absolutism. The democratic revolution of
1918 and the Weimar Republic that it created collapsed under the implacable
hostility of extremist parties, the shock of the inflation of 1923 and the Great
Depression, and the mistakes of democratic leaders. These failures are deeply
etched in their memories, so that, when they come upon evidence of serious
economic problems or
Gordon A. Craig
27
government inefficiency or party corruption, they have a tendency to think
instinctively that the worst may not be far away. The January article in Die Zeit to
which I referred was headlined "IF ALL OUR FOUNDATIONS COLLAPSE" and
warned that if they were more scandals like the one in Schleswig-Holstein or a
continued lack of energy in dealing with the country's other problems, then
"democracy will collapse because of the democrats." This is what I mean by
nervousness about the fragility of their institutions and the fear of reversion to an
unhappy past.
As for the question of identity, the Germans have always, throughout their
history, brooded about this more than other peoples, but in their present divided
condition they are particularly prone to be concerned about it. The question was
muted during the heady excitement of the economic miracle in the fifties and again
in the hopeful phase of the detente period in the seventies. But with the marked
deterioration of relations between the superpowers in the late seventies, the
Germans became less sure of themselves and more aware of their vulnerability,
and this made them both more introspective and more self-assertive. As Iring
Fetscher has written, "the wish to be ... to be something specific in a national
sense" awakened again. It was manifested in growing concern about the
consequences to Germany of new superpower confrontations, in active criticism of
NATO and its strategy, and in a new interest in the possibility of independent
German policy initiatives that might lead to a de-nuclearization of Central Europe
and a dismantling of the power blocs that were posed there. This was the stock in
trade of the new Greens Party and the left wing of the Socialists, but even the
moderates were not immune to the feeling that what one writer called "the
nakedness of German identity" was no longer compensated for by the present
international system. This feeling—which was not assuaged by the much
controverted emplacement of the Pershings in 1983 and was exacerbated by the
loose talk in the Western press after the Bitburg fiasco about the unregenerate
Germans—had wide-spread repercussions, contributing powerfully to the
Historikerstreit, to the rise of the Republikaner, and to the present dispute within
NATO.
Enough has been said about the war of the German historians within the walls
of this institute to warrant my passing over it today, except to say that, in general
terms, the Historikerstreit turned on the problem of how Germans were to identify
with a history that included Adolf Hitler and, more narrowly, how they could
historicize the experience of the Third Reich without appearing to outsid-
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
28
ers to be trivializing it. The duration of the controversy and the passions
engendered by it show how difficult it is to solve this problem and how painful it is
for sensitive Germans to live with it. There is no doubt that this will affect the
German psyche for a long time.
The other problems are less serious, although the reaction to the emergence of
the Republikaner perfectly illustrates what I have said about West German
nervousness concerning the permanence of their democratic political institutions.
In the wake of their success in Berlin and the success of the NPD in Frankfurt,
Count Otto Lambsdorff of the FDP suggested in a state of high excitement that
these results recalled the last years of the Weimar Republic. This was doom-saying
with a vengeance and hardly justified. An analysis of the voting patterns in the
Berlin elections, in which the Republikaner won 7.5% of the vote, makes it seem
highly questionable whether many of those who rallied to the party did so because
they were thinking ideologically or, indeed, indicating approval of Franz
Schönhuber’s undoubtedly super-heated nationalistic views. Five of the ten
electoral districts in which the Reps made their greatest gains lay in the old
working class districts of Neukölln and the others were either in "Red Wedding" or
predominantly lower-middle-class Reinickendorf. Here the primary motive for the
swing to the Reps seems to have been the feeling that the interests of the residents
of these districts were being neglected by the major parties, as well as concern over
rising unemployment and the shortage of decent and affordable housing, dismay
over the reckless destruction of whole blocks of small stores and comfortable
Kneipen in favor of gigantic living complexes that are alien to the older population,
fear of the effects of the drug culture on public safety, and resentment over the
increasing number of foreign immigrants and political exiles who compete for
local jobs and housing. A vigorous attack upon these problems by the new city
government might very well make the Republikaner a transitory factor in Berlin
politics. That their success has encouraged more extreme factions to the right of
them—like the Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Gerhard Frey's Deutsche
Volksunion, and Michael Kuhnen's Nationale Sammlung—is undoubtedly true, but
those groups are too small to represent an important factor in national politics,
where, for that matter, Schönhuber has not yet demonstrated the viability of his
own party. It is in any case premature to think that Schönhuber et al. are capable of
turning Bonn into Weimar.
Gordon A. Craig
29
It may indeed be that his program and his rhetoric have had less effect in his
own country than in Great Britain, where they awakened fears of neo-Nazism, and
in the United States, where the open anti-Americanism of his speeches may have
strengthened fears of German unreliability. Schönhuber has made no bones of the
fact that he believes the Federal Republic has deferred to the United States too long
at the expense of its own identity and interest, and in a speech at Cham in the wake
of the Berlin election he cried out triumphantly, "The counter for tickets to
Canossa is closed! The epoch of re-education has ended! The exclusive
responsibility for the Second World War is no longer ours!" Arnulf Baring has
written recently of the growth in Germany of the idea that a loosening of the
relationship with the United States might be advantageous. Schönhuber is surely
the most extreme representative of that view, and in his book, Freunde in der Not
has said boldly:
Total commitment to the American way of life seems to me to be unnecessary. We
must go our own way. To me personally the Russians are, as far as mentality goes,
closer than the Americans... The smear campaign against the Germans that still
prevails in the American mass media at times raises doubts about their willingness to
accept us as equal partners. We ought to consider ourselves too good for cannon
fodder, ... .
In his book of essays, Trotz allem Deutschland, he calls for reunification with the
assistance of the Soviet Union, adding:
Russia is nearer to us than America, not merely geographically. Here I am a follower
of Bismarck, who believed that they key to the fruitful development of our fatherland
lay in a positive relationship with Russia.
Statements like this, relayed from Germany to Washington correspondents, are
doubtless part of the background music to present controversy over modernization
of missiles or negotiation.
In this dispute, we again see the way in which the shadow of the past hangs
over Germany's fortunes, for this is not something new but goes back to the Paris
Treaty of 1954 and the decision to admit the Federal Republic to NATO. That was
not universally popular in Germany, and there were many at that time who felt that
it would make Germany the battlefield of any future war. In the domestic debate in
1954, Franz-Josef Strauß declared, "We expect of the Government that it will press
successfully for a strategic conception in which Germany cannot become the
theater of a conflict," and he was solemnly assured by Konrad Adenauer that
membership in
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
30
NATO would preclude that possibility. How it would do so he did not explain, and
Der Spiegel, in an analysis of NATO's forward strategy in November 1954,
pointed out that it was based upon a fluid defense that would probably mean that
the country, in the case of war would have to suffer both a Soviet occupation and a
liberation from the West. As if stung by mounting criticism of that order, NATO
made a revolutionary decision in December 1954 and decided to use tactical
nuclear weapons in the defense.
It should be recalled that there was a German alternative to this, the so-called
Bonin plan for the creation of a German army of 150,000 professional volunteers
who would operate separately from NATO forces and would conduct an
unconditional defense at the zonal border with mobile anti-tank units supported by
six armored divisions. This plan, which had strong supporters among professional
soldiers and writers like Basil Liddell Hart, who was bitterly critical of NATO's
new nuclear strategy, was rejected, in a decision doubtless affected by historical
memory, and its author was dismissed from the Bundeswehr for wishing to carry
the debate to the public. The NATO nuclear decision stood, although some NATO
members (doubtless those later called "the wets") were reported to feel that this
decision "may have opened up a Pandora's box that will eventually disintegrate the
coalition." These apprehensions became stronger when NATO held its first nuclear
exercise in June 1955. In this so-called Operation Carte Blanche, the planes of
eleven NATO members simulated the use of nuclear weapons in the area between
Hamburg and Munich. When it was over, the referees estimated that 1,700,000
Germans had been killed and 3,500,000 wounded; and the resultant outcry
seriously jeopardized the passage by the Bundestag of the Volunteers Bill.
All of that is ancient history or would be if the pigeons hatched in those times
had not come to roost. The illogic of NATO strategy was forgotten in the late
fifties and sixties, when American strategic nuclear power made a conflict in
central Europe unlikely; but that superiority came to an end in the late seventies,
and since then Germans have had to live with the fear of new confrontations
between the superpowers and new Carte Blanches over their soil. This was not
allayed by the removal of the Pershings in accordance with the terms of the INF
treaty in December 1987, since the U.S. government began almost immediately to
plan ways of compensating for what was given up in that treaty, one of the ways
being to "modernize" the Lance short range missile, modernization meaning in this
context to replace it with a new weapons system with a
Gordon A. Craig
31
range four times as great as the original. The Germans, not unnaturally, would
rather negotiate to remove all nuclear weapons from German soil, since their
presence there, given the increasing unlikelihood of an American President being
willing to risk American cities by using, or threatening to use, strategic nuclear
weapons against a Soviet aggression—assures that war, if it comes, will be fought
in Germany (Volker Ruhe of the CDU has said, "The shorter the range of the
weapon, the more Germans killed;" and Egon Bahr of the SPD has pointed out that
NATO strategists will have to face up to the fact that the alliance is viable only on
the basis of common security and common risk). Since the present climate, thanks
to Gorbachev, seems propitious for negotiation, the Germans want to begin it now.
Hence the present crisis of NATO.
It should be noted that nothing in the German behavior during this dispute
justifies the ebulitions of the journalists and anonymous spokesmen in London and
Washington. The German attitude toward modernization should have been well
known in those capitals. Frans-Josef Strauß had warned Secretary of Defense
Carlucci in February 1988 that the plan would have little chance of getting through
the Bundestag, and in the months that followed, signals that intimated the same
view came from the Chancellor's office. There was no stab-in-the-back. There was
no secret plot to do in NATO or to withdraw from it. The pro-NATO sentiment in
Germany is so strong that even Franz Schönhuber finds it expedient to support it.
Nor was there any design to push for reunification. The practical difficulties that
prevent the speedy consummation of that goal are so well-known that it is strange
that they have escaped the attention of Messrs. Buchanan, Safire, and Will; just as
the possibilities of negotiation in the present climate of opinion are so palpable that
Vice President Quayle's description of Mr. Gorbachev as "a bit of a phony" can
only be regarded as an expression of petulance or poverty of thought. The crisis in
NATO can be solved if we remember that we are friends, and have been friends for
forty years, and that friends must trust each other and be attentive to each other's
individual interests as well as to their common ones. The sticking point of
negotiations can be removed if we show ourselves to be cautious rather than
suspicious and open to new possibilities rather than fearful of change.
Meanwhile, this is a birthday, and I have brought a birthday card, on which I
have written the words of my friend Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History
at Oxford, who a month ago said of the Federal Republic: "She fulfils the role that
we used to
Democratic Progress and Shadows of the Past
32
fulfil of combining economic efficiency, educational excellence, and all-
round seriousness with political liberalism and respect for people's rights;
she is now in my own opinion, the model European country." And, anent
negotiations and their possibilities, he added, if she is careful and is not
discouraged by her allies, "she is very well-placed to offer a bridge by
which Communist Russia can cross into the European family."
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